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Kerry Wood Nature Centre – Ladyslipper

A few weeks ago we decided to go on a family outing to Kerry Wood Nature Centre in Red Deer, Alberta. Behind the main building lies a nature sanctuary that contains a small lake, a bird blind, a short 1 km trail and a longer 4 km trail. On this particular day we set out to do the longer trail, it was a nice day for a walk, plus I had a mission in mind to photograph as many flowers as possible. For a while I have been painting larger canvases based on macro images of flowers, or more accurately “garden variety flowers”…. literally. Delphinium, Daisies, Allium, Nasturtium………you get the picture. Feeling that it was time to switch things up a bit, and having no desire to paint marigolds, I decided that perhaps wild flowers and plants might be a nice direction to pursue as a subject matter. I had already dabbled in this direction with a painting I had done of yarrow based on an image I had taken on the west coast, so it seemed natural to try out the same theme with some local Alberta plants.

I will admit I took a lot of images on this walk, 100+ images per km, so I thought I would break down the outing into a few posts. I thought I would start with the Ladyslipper as they are quite rare to come across when walking, so it was a treat to find a few different patches of the flower. This is also the first flower to be tackled as a painting from the outing, the canvas is 10 inches by 10 inches and the painting is a third to a half-finished. I’ll share the painting on the blog once it is finished.